Lifestyle

Forget Studying Abroad, Take a Semester Online

Undergrads may not complete their degrees for a variety of reasons. A family member becomes ill and they need to return home; they find a promising internship in another city; they don't think their campus' coursework is the right fit.

A new offering from online education platform 2U, Semester Online, hopes to provide a better option for stifled undergrads. For $4,200 per course, undergrads can enroll in and receive credits for the 11 courses offered in the inaugural term of Semester Online.

"We're unleashing the university from its physical boundaries," 2U co-founder Chip Paucek tells Mashable. "We're not trying to replace the on-campus undergraduate experience, but we think it can be a great supplement."

Paucek suggests that a semester online would be ideal for anyone, for instance, a student who needs to return home briefly for family reasons or someone looking for more rigorous offerings during study abroad.

At launch, Semester Online offers 11 courses taught by professors from Boston College, Emory, Northwestern, UNC, Notre Dame and Washington University in St. Louis. Titles range from the more traditional "History of Religions in America" and "Environmental and Energy Policies" to the unconventional "How to Rule the World" and "Baseball and American Culture."

Paucek believes the course selection will soon expand widely. Particularly, Semester Online hopes to offer obscure and advanced languages, which students enrolled full-time on a campus could use to supplement their school's offerings.

Though students can apply via Semester Online's website through May 24 to participate in the fall term, no admissions decisions are made by 2U.

First launched in 2008, 2U has seen some 7,000 students complete programs through the platform. Each week, instructors teach 1,146 grad courses live from the six institutions offering online degrees: USC, Georgetown, UNC, WashU, GW and American. The grad classes have an average class size of 12, and 84% of students enrolled complete their programs.

Unlike the undergrad courses, which are slightly marked down, grad program tuition is precisely what it would be on a typical campus.

Paucek himself has been enrolled for three semesters in UNC's online MBA program, a degree he never had time to earn on campus while starting three companies.

"It's full participation, since there's no back row," Paucek says. "You're called on a lot more than you would be in a larger lecture hall."

Most classes have some on-campus intensive component, and throughout all programs, students collaborate with their classmates. Two masters of social work students enrolled in the USC program have even gotten married after meeting in class.

"There's an issue of portability," Paucek says. "People can't always pick up their lives, leave their jobs and move somewhere. Great schools are starting to think this way."

BONUS: 10 Online Courses to Beef Up Your STEM Knowledge

10 Courses to Beef Up Your STEM Knowledge

This advanced Udacity class will teach you how to program a robotic car, under the expert instruction of Sebastian Thrun, who ran Google and Stanford's driving teams. Like all Udacity courses, it's free to take.

This General Assembly course looks at approaches to mobile strategy ranging from responsive design to mobile first to native apps. It will be offered on Thursday, March 21 from 2 to 3 p.m. ET and costs $20.

If you want to learn the basics of software development, try this semester-long course offered on MIT OpenCourseWare. You'll learn to write software that's free from bugs, easy to understand and ready for change.

Want to gain a comprehensive understanding of how Google Analytics works? Try this General Assembly course Wednesday, March 20 from 2 to 3 p.m. ET. The $20 course will give you a comprehensive understanding of what GA can do for your business.

If you're curious to understand when life on earth developed, try this Khan Academy curriculum. You'll learn the history of life on earth, how human evolved as a species and whether there could be intelligent life on other planets.

You read statistics in news headlines every day, but are you really confident in your understanding of statistics? If not, you should try this eight-week course, offered on Coursera, that promises to bring you up to speed on collection, display and analysis.

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is a leading global media company that informs, inspires and entertains the digital generation. Mashable is redefining storytelling by documenting and shaping the digital revolution in a new voice, new formats and cutting-edge technologies to a uniquely dedicated audience of 42 million monthly unique visitors and 24 million social followers.